Discussion on: Symfony 4 is the new Boss in PHP Framework

Well, I do agree that Symfony 4 is "the boss" of frameworks at the moment, but definitely not because of all the stuff listed.
In fact, the stuff listed in the article are the reasons why Symfony 3 became Symfony 4, by stripping down most of the features included by default in the framework in an effort to make it leaner and faster.
The advantage of Symfony 4 is that you can strip it down and make it lighter (both in disk size and loaded functionality), but even so it still performs poorly in terms of sheer speed and memory footprint (look at Ubiquity 2 or Symlex - just don't mistake it for Silex).

The world has already moved away from fullstack frameworks (even backend monoliths would be frowned upon when starting a new project). If I were to make a new API project, the stack would look more like:

• PHPDI - dependency injection container
• thephpleague router
• monolog
• thephpleague plates (for templating, significantly faster than twig - if you need server side rendering)
• Doctrine (speaking of which, the Doctrine items you listed are Doctrine advantages, not Symfony advantages)
• roadrunner as the PHP application platform (if you haven't tried it, you should) OR symlex (which is still a fullstack framework, but with true modularity)

The reason being that the first 3 are PSR-compatible components, whereas Symfony needs an additional translating service to normalise its requests/responses in a way that allows you to take advantage of its modularity (also, if requests/responses aren't PSR-compatible you can't use an application platform like roadrunner for true concurrency & paralellism).